American Shinto: Or How Conservatives Offend the Dead

Most American conservatives are so rooted in 19th-century liberalism that they lack any trace of filial piety: proper love and respect for one's parents, elders, and ancestors.

From The European Conservative

By Carlos Perona Calvete

When the Japanese arrived in Hawaii, they had no problem identifying the local kami, or 'spirits,' of the nation. We explore the importance of national definition.

It’s common to encounter conservatives whose ‘liberal priors’—the liberal background to their worldview—are so strong as to almost completely dissuade them from any meaningful policy proposals.

Politics without definitions

I once heard conservatives argue that a nation’s definition, for example, cannot be meaningfully arrived at, taking for granted that such a definition would in some way imply an imposition on people.

But suppose we state that a woman wanting to leave the residence she shares with her husband represents a breakdown of that marriage. We do not mean to imply that she should not be allowed to do as she pleases, only that our definition of a functional marriage includes the partners wanting to share a common space. 

In the same way, a nation has a need for some minimal definition, a consensus generalis. If public institutions and a sizeable percentage of private citizens do not hold to a specific common understanding of their national identity, the thing can justifiably be said to be falling apart. 

The other part of the ‘conservative’ argument I encountered was that, in any case, the definition of a nation should be kept hollow enough as to not elicit ideological reactions on the part of one’s political opponents—as though ‘woke’ ESG capitalism needed hardliners on the other side of the political aisle in order to visit its designs on society.

These two ‘lacks’ largely continue to define the modern conservative: a lack of belief in the legitimacy of articulating common positions that can serve as a basis for collective identities and a lack of gumption as far as ideological struggle goes. These amount to rejecting both community and conflict, leaving us with perfect, individualistic passivity. 

Building shrines in foreign lands

When the Japanese arrived in Hawaii as immigrants and set up communities, they opened Shinto temples for their faithful. Generally, Shinto observance requires that shrines be consecrated to the local Kami (meaning spirits or deities), and in the case of the U.S., the Japanese arrivals perceived clearly who the kami of the nation were: George Washington (“the national father”) and Abraham Lincoln (“the nation’s restorer”).

From the Japanese-Hawaiian Daijingu Temple’s website:

The kami enshrined in the Hawaii Daijingu Temple are many; The Sun Goddess Amaterasu Omikami, the myriads of kami who flank Amaterasu Omikami, the national father George Washington, the nation’s restorer Abraham Lincoln and other men and women of distinguished services, King Kamehameha, King Kalakaua, and other men and women of great services to the state of Hawaii.

Presumably today, the question of who the local kami are would lead to an irresolvable debate (even by the standards of ‘conservatives,’ whose real, if unexamined, creed is that of post-1960s liberalism).

Of course, I am not advocating for the enshrining or ‘worshipping’ of kami (obviously, I believe worship is due to God alone). However, nations (like professions or crafts) do exist under certain ‘principalities,’ in the wake of people and under the spiritual authority of entities, some of which are righteous (like patron saints and angels). 

The kami against technocracy

Just as we seek to know who our father is and what household we belong to by virtue of our last name, we need to acknowledge the principalities we live under: the patrons and prophets who guided our own piece of human commonwealth—our jurisdiction within the earthly and cosmic Church. This falls under the ‘honour your father and your mother’ species of piety.

One cannot, for example, govern Italy without tacitly taking Theodoric the Great and his Regnum Italiae for granted, given that advocates for unification of the peninsula like Cola di Rienzo and Garibaldi acted as they did on the basis of their Ostrogothic predecessor (who in turn built on the basis of Roman precedent). 

However, you can govern Italy without acknowledging that this is so, which is to say that you can govern as though you were not stewarding a pre-existing, historically recurring, political, and cultural entity. In such a case, you will fall into mere technocratic, denaturing politics.

Once we reduce a community (nation, family, etc.) to a mere contract between persons, once we atomize it and refuse to admit that it has some concrete definition (however bare bones and however much we accept people’s right to reject it), we have given the game away; we’ve hollowed out any future political struggle.